Bookish and the Beast (Once Upon a Con #3)(7)

“What a performance!” the female announcer cries.

The male announcer agrees. “And that was Darien Freeman as the sexy Goblin King! How do you feel after that performance?”

“I feel like I’m going to win this,” Darien says to the audience, grinning, and then turns to Jess to add, “Sorry, ah’blena,” with a wink. She sticks out her tongue at him. The teen girls in the front row squeal as he says ah’blena like he just hit the sweet spot of their souls. “I couldn’t ask for a better opponent.”

“Or a better costar,” she adds.

“Or a better costar.”

“Speaking of costars, now I’ve got to know,” the announcer says, leaning toward Darien a little, and I can feel a chill curl up my spine. “Do you think you could ever get Vance Reigns on the show?”

“Never,” I reply, putting my feet on the coffee table. I steal a piece of popcorn from Elias, and one for Sansa, before Elias bats my feet off the table with a glare because it’s not our house.

It doesn’t matter—if I ruin something, I’ll just buy the owner a new one.

“I mean, after he returns from his break, of course,” the female announcer agrees with a smile.

“My break?” I mutter. “More like exile.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Elias says.

Darien laughs. “I’ll see what I can do. No promises. But! I can give you one thing that I know you’ve been waiting for.”

Jess nods from the sofa. “The first-ever look at Starfield: Resonance!”

I finish off the last few kernels of popcorn and roll off the couch. “All right, I’m heading to bed—”

“Let Sansa out first,” Elias reminds me.

“How could I forget my good girl? My best girl!” I scrub Sansa behind the ears. Her pink tongue lolls out happily, and she slides off the couch and follows me to the back door. Sometimes it feels like Sansa’s the only girl who doesn’t care that I’m Vance Reigns. It’s because she doesn’t understand the concept of an A-list film star with a track record for bad ideas, but I’d like to think it’s because I give her extra treaties when Elias isn’t looking. I slide the door open, and she trots out as I find the floodlights and flip them on. Sansa’s ears whirl around, and she darts out into the darkness beyond the pool and the shed and into the backyard.

I shove my hands into my pockets and kick a rock into the pool, and watch it sink to the bottom.

Everyone keeps calling this a break, but it’s not.

I didn’t choose this.

My stepfather did. “If you can’t grow up, then you’re going to learn the hard way,” he’d said.

He thought that by taking away all of my toys, my cars, my friends, he could somehow punish me for—for what? Having a little fun? As if he could throw me into some nowhere town to teach me a lesson.

Well, joke’s on him.

The only lesson I’m learning is how to absolutely ignore him the second I turn eighteen on October 11. As soon I do, I’m out of here. Just a month more.

I can endure this for a month.



* * *



—

THE MOMENT MY FLIGHT FROM LA ARRIVED, I hated this place. Four hours in an airplane, and it seems like I landed on another world. Into the tiniest airport imaginable. One terminal, twelve gates. Outside, it wasn’t much better. Too many trees, all still somehow green even though it was September. A hired driver in an old tweed suit drove me to the middle of nowhere and deposited me in front of a house that looked like a castle, though, complete with a drawbridge and two turrets and a mazelike rose garden in the back, built of gray stones and some recluse’s pipe dream. I came with my suitcase and nothing else. My driver pulled away without even a second glance. He left me to be murdered by goats or cows or whatever the hell is in the middle of farmland.

I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and squinted up at the place where I’d be living for the next few months.

“You can’t keep doing this, Vance,” my stepfather had said when he sentenced me here. “Maybe some time away will help you see things differently.”

And it just so happened that the director of Starfield: Resonance—my stepfather’s best friend—had a house she wasn’t using.

The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in and took my Lacostes off in the foyer. I was expecting swords on the walls and skeletons hanging, mouths agape, but the inside of the castle looked right good, really. The floors were a dark wood and while the walls were bare stone, they were decorated with paintings from IKEA and Better Homes and Gardens.

It would have to do.

“Elias, I’m here,” I called as I dumped my duffel bag in the hallway and made my way into the living room. It was wide and open, with two long couches and a TV, and in the corner there was a baby grand piano. The back wall was nothing but glass windows that looked out onto the hedge maze and a pool. I found the drawstring to the curtains and drew them closed.

The refrigerator was stocked, so Elias had to be somewhere. I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it as I wandered through the rest of the house. Bathroom, laundry room, abandoned study—

The last door on the first level was ajar, so I eased it open.

Shelves and shelves of novels lined the walls, those cheap dime-store extended-universe sci-fi books you used to be able to find at petrol stations and grocery stores. There must’ve be hundreds of them—Star Wars, Star Trek, Starfield, at a cursory glance.